New Investment/Trading Firm Finds Niche
By Linda Prospero
Reuters Wire

NEW YORK, April 5 (Reuters) - Toussaint Capital Partners, a nascent investment banking and trading company in New York, is not trying to be all things to all people but in the two months its doors have been opened, it seems to have found a niche.

"We're not a one-stop shop," said Avery Byrd, president and chief executive officer of the boutique firm that started business at 40 Wall Street only two months ago.

Toussaint Capital Partners plans to focus on institutional clients, with 50 percent of its business in sales and trading of secondary securities, both on the taxable and tax-exempt debt and equity side, and 50 percent of its focus on the new issue side.

"Even at a small intimate environment, we try to provide some type of diversification of our product and business lines," Byrd said. What the company won't be doing is dealing with retail clients, or providing lines of credit, bridge loans, merger and acquisition activity and other services that larger securities firms typically include in their book of business.

The minority-owned company was founded by Byrd and three partners Vernon Gatling, Paul Williams and Wendell Bristol, who all have extensive years of experience working in various capacities in the fixed-income and public finance markets.

The partners put up 90 percent of the initial capital to start the firm, with about 10 percent coming from three institutional investors. They have also teamed up with First Montauk Securities Corp., an independent broker-dealer that is able to provide certain infrastructure, including back-office services, which allows Toussaint to focus its time and attention on generating deal flow.

After performing an elaborate market survey, Byrd and his partners decided they could carve out a niche utilizing their years of expertise for customers who are sometimes overlooked by larger Wall street firms that target larger and what they perceive to be more profitable clients.

Secondary trading activity in equities and fixed income securities including municipal, corporate, and asset-backed bonds offerings, is expected to be the lifeblood of the privately held firm for the first six months, Byrd said.

But in its first two months alone, Toussaint has also been involved in six primary offerings for a total of about $3.5 billion various New York City municipal deals, and in two new issue preferred equity offerings totaling about $720 million.

"If our first two months are any indication, municipal finance could be an extremely large focus," Byrd said. While he declined to give projections on the amount of business forecast for the first year, Byrd said he'd be happy with over $10 million.

"Anything over that would be fine," he said. Projections that were done ahead of launching the company forecast flat revenue for the first two months of operations, but business has been better than planned and several other new deals are in the pipeline, Byrd said.

"So if you talk about where we are in terms of projections, we're ahead of schedule," he said. The firm, which currently employs eight people, expects to ramp up to about 12 to 15 employees in the next three to six months, Byrd said.